The Unique Basque Language

Basque is a language isolate ancestral to the Basque people, who are indigenous to and mainly inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 27% of Basques in all territories (714,136 out of 2,648,998).  Of these, 663,035 live in the Spanish part of the Basque Country and the remaining 51,100 live in the French part.

In academic discussions of the distribution of Basque in Spain and France, it is customary to refer to three ancient provinces in France and four Spanish provinces. Native speakers are concentrated in a contiguous area including parts of the Spanish autonomous communities of the Basque Country and Navarre and in the western half of the French departement of Pyrenees-Atlantiques. The Basque Autonomous Community is an administrative entity within the binational ethnographic Basque Country incorporating the traditional Spanish provinces of Biscay, Gipuzkoa, and Alava, which retain their existence as politico-administrative divisions.

Gipuzkoa, most of Biscay, a few municipalities of Álava and the northern area of Navarre formed the core of the remaining Basque-speaking area before measures were introduced in the 1980s to strengthen the language.

History and Classification

Though geographically surrounded by Indo-European Romance languages, Basque is classified as a language isolate. It is the last remaining descendant of the pre-Indo-European languages of Western Europe.  Consequently, its prehistory may not be reconstructible by means of the comparative method except by applying it to differences between dialects within the language. Little is known of its origins but it is likely that an early form of the Basque language was present in Western Europe before the arrival of the Indo-European languages to the area.

Authors such as Miguel de Unamuno and Louis Lucien Bonaparte have noted that the words for "knife" (aizto), "axe" (aizkora) and "hoe" (aitzur) derive from the word for "stone" (haitz), and have therefore concluded that the language dates to the Stone Age, when those tools were made of stone; others find this unlikely; see the aizkora controversy.

Latin inscriptions in Aquitania preserve a number of words with cognates in reconstructed proto-Basque, for instance the personal names Nescato and Cison (neskato and gizon mean "young girl" and "man" respectively in modern Basque). This language is generally referred to as Aquitanian and is assumed to have been spoken in the area before the Roman conquests in the western Pyrenees. Some authors even argue that the language moved westward during Late Antiquity, after the fall of Rome, into the northern part of Hispania in which Basque is spoken today.

Roman neglect of this area allowed Aquitanian to survive while the Iberian and Tartessian languages became extinct. Through the long contact with Romance languages, Basque adopted a sizable number of Romance words. Initially the source was Latin, later Gascon (a branch of Ocxitan) in the northeast, Navarro-Aragonese in the southeast and Spanish in the southwest.

Hypotheses on Connections with Other Languages

 The impossibility of linking Basque with its Indo-European neighbors in Europe has inspired many scholars to search for its possible relatives elsewhere. Besides many pseudoscientific comparisons, the appearance of long-range linguistics gave rise to several attempts to connect Basque with geographically very distant language families. All hypotheses on the origin of Basque are controversial, and the suggested evidence is not generally accepted by most linguists. Some of these hypothetical connections are as follows:

• Iberian: another ancient language once spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, shows several similarities with Aquitanian and Basque. However, there is not enough evidence to distinguish geographical connections from linguistic ones. Iberian itself remains unclassified.  Eduardo Orduña Aznar claims to have established correspondences between Basque and Iberian numerals and noun case markers.
• Indo-European: possibly close to (Italo-)Celtic or an Indo-European creole  possibly with a donor language akin to Brittonic on a substrate language akin to Italic. Forni considers it unrealistic that Basque is a non-Indo-European language which allegedly borrowed the majority of its basic lexicon (including virtually all verbs) and most of its archaic bound morphemes from neighboring Indo-European languages.  In response, a non-Indo-European line of descent with waves or stages of Indo-European influence and minor discontinuities over probably millennia prior to the Roman conquest was suggested as the most likely alternative by John T. Koch in his review of Forni's paper outlining why an Indo-European classification of Basque cannot be accepted, even if some of Forni's data is accepted.
• Vasconic substratum hypothesis: This proposal, made by the German linguist Theo Vennemann, claims that there is enough toponymical evidence to conclude that Basque is the only survivor of a larger family that once extended throughout most of Europe, and has also left its mark in modern Indo-European languages  spoken in Europe.
• Ligurian substrate: this hypothesis proposed in the 19th century by d'Arbois de Joubainville, J. Pokorny, P. Kretschmer and several other linguists encompasses the Basco-Iberian hypothesis.
• Georgian: linking Basque to Kartvelian languagess is now widely discredited. The hypothesis was inspired by the existence of the ancient Kingdom of Iberia in the Caucasus and further by some typological similarities between the two languages. According to J.P. Mallory, in his 1989 book In Search of the Indo-Europeans, the hypothesis was also inspired by a Basque place-name ending in - dze.
• Northeast Caucasian: such as Chechen, is seen by the French linguist Michel Morvan as more likely candidates for a very distant connection.
• Dene-Caucasian: based on the possible Caucasian link, some linguists, for example John Bengtson and Merritt Ruhlen, have proposed including Basque in the Dene-Caucasian superfamily of languages, but this proposed superfamily includes languages from North America and Eurasia, and its existence is highly controversial.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language